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Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, October 20 ...

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, October 2023

Nov 07, 2023

Today is Commonday, 18 of Skarl 4116. [4116.07.18]

…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission, provided that you comply with the terms of the license. However, feel free to ask for help or otherwise reach out, too.

October’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the fortieth issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

Laptop Shopping Time, Epilogue…Maybe

Now that I have sat with the purchase for a few weeks, in case anybody needs to make a similar purchase, I can provide a handful of thoughts about the Pangolin in particular, and changing machines in general.

  • This speeds up a lot of my scripts and other software, to the point that I now represent the bottleneck on a lot of tasks—such as publishing the blog—which I like, despite the frustration that it causes. I knew that its predecessor ran slow, but had no concrete idea that it ran orders of magnitude slower than a modern system.

  • The case feels slightly better than I expected, though the size undoes that added security, because it now needs to support more awkward balances.

  • The hinge doesn’t open quite wide enough for my general use of putting the laptop in a stand propped up at as high an angle as possible, so I need to then prop up the stand so that I can have the screen near eye-level.

  • I don’t really understand the “camera privacy” switch, because it has unclear labeling as to what it does—it cuts access to the camera—and which direction does what.

  • Some keys sit barely out of reach of where I would expect to access them, so I invariably end up with my cursor in the wrong part of a document. The cursor keys, in particular, don’t have any “hint” to tell my fingers where to find them.

  • The touchpad sometimes—maybe affected by temperature and my position, or maybe it has more to do with me?—insists on recognizing every single motion as a series of clicks, making life miserable until I relocate, or it decides to settle in.

Other than the touchpad, none of these bothers me too much, so I’d call it a good purchase, despite the concerns that I discussed in the last newsletter or two.

Update already: The touchpad became so bad that I contacted technical support while I used a twenty-year-old mini-trackball that shockingly ran on USB. System 76—in the spirit of “right to repair”—sent instructions on unplugging the pad and plugging back in, which appears to have fixed whatever poor placement their assembly had done while rushing this batch out the door, at least for a while. And I bought a pack of “adhesive dots” to identify important keys.

And for transferring UNIX-like machines…

For transferring bulk data—a folder of many code repositories, uncategorized downloads, whatever—commands similar to tar cz -C/path archive | nc -l -p 8888 -w 10 do a great job of packing everything up on the old computer and serving it up for the new computer to pull down with nc XXX.XXX.IP.ADDR 8888 | tar xzp -C/path, where path, archive, and XXX.XXX.IP.ADDR change to whatever you need. After getting the big hunks of data down, it became easier to set up ssh keys and use scp to copy individual files and small folders across, or use rsync to re-synchronize the large batches, where I needed to continue using the old computer. I may write this up as a tech-tip, at some point.

Project Previews

The day job soaks up a lot of time that might have previously gone to side-projects, but I can still occasionally dig into weird ideas that might become something down the road…

Into the Rift

No actual progress, here, though I did have a couple of conversations with writers who—not knowing me or anything about this project—expressed an interest in seeing something like this happen, so I feel like this could actually catch on.

Tutaititaa

I have the relevant stories all converted to a common Markdown format, so that I can read them and pick them apart more easily.

Media

In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or read in October.

No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they didn’t take long. You can probably estimate that I watched about an episode of any given “archived” television show per day, though, if that helps. If you’d like to know what I finish watching as I finish it—sometimes I catch something during the narrow window when people can watch it free—you might consider becoming a member at Buy Me a Coffee.

  • Only Murders in the Building, season 3, had an extremely rough start—I guess believing that we came to the show to watch Paul Rudd, for some reason?—but came together really nicely for the final stretch.

  • I don’t want to say that I didn’t like Ahsoka, because it had enjoyable parts, but also…I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I watched. Early episodes felt like advertisements for the animated shows. That drifted into a weird miasma of interesting ideas that get almost no attention, and then an ending that felt like a narrator telling us about the strong emotional impact.

    • The rebooted Thrawn—I suppose that we saw him before on one of the cartoons and I’ve forgotten?—also doesn’t make much sense as a major player. In his first appearances in novels, back when we spoke about “the Star Wars trilogy” with no thought to future cinematic expansion, author Timothy Zahn played up Thrawn’s interest in studying allies and enemies, both personal and general, particularly through their art. That planning made him feel like a credible threat, because the narrative could “play” him as having planned for all possible outcomes. Here…nothing makes him feel threatening or even important, and stopping him doesn’t solve the problem of Imperial loyalists sabotaging the Republic at all.

  • The Spanish Daughter took a while to warm up, maybe even too long, because the final third of the book introduces a romance, becomes a more overt detective story, and indicates the ending, but then rushes to the ending at the expense of everything else. And I feel like the “everything else” part dramatically improved the story. Oh, well.

  • The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez, especially for its brevity, impressed me. It has decent characters—including managing to show us teenagers who don’t constantly try to remind us of their age through pop culture references and implausible use of slang—and a big plot.

  • When Trying to Return Home, as one might expect in any anthology, feels hit-or-miss. Some stories have some depth. Others think that their concept provides all the depth that they need…

  • Pride shouldn’t have bothered with a Pride and Prejudice foundation. It has a decent story on its own, but also making it a pastiche or remix felt like it bogged the story down as it tried to find appropriate new names for characters who mostly only get walk-on parts anyway.

  • Police Squad! (on DVD) holds up fairly well after more than forty years, probably better than the films. And at only six half-hour episodes, you could have already gotten through a significant chunk of the series in the time that it took you to read this…

  • Funny Face came shockingly close to outright offending me. Don’t get me wrong. Audrey Hepburn gets a thumbs-up. Fred Astaire gets a thumbs-up. However, aging Fred Astaire assaulting young Audrey Hepburn, upending her life, separating her from her social support, interfering with her new friendships, and ultimately seducing her…I don’t think the proper words exist…

  • I enjoyed SilverHawks (on DVD) as a kid, though even at the time, I found their fast-and-loose science, with a “galaxy” that has only one star (maybe two?), gravity, and air, an odd choice for a show that ends every episode with an astronomy quiz. The show certainly has its issues that age has only amplified, but I had fun rewatching it.

Blog Posts for October 2023

In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.

I also revisited and updated some older posts, for various reasons.

Significant changes to the text come with clear and dated markings. Changing the wording or correcting a typo is more routine, but it indicates that I’ve at least been looking at the post. Longer changes probably have a brief write-up in this very newsletter.

The most popular posts on the blog have been Copyright Searches, (Finally) Cutting the Cord, Content Advisories, and Recutils — Small Technology Notes for the month.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.

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